The chief of Haiti’s national police force doubts their story: “They wanted to kill him. They knew what they were doing.”
Via Tampa Bay Times:
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The operation that led to Haitian President Jovenel Moïse’s middle-of-the-night assassination was in the planning for at least a month, and came together during meals around Port-au-Prince and at a home where most of the men accused of the slaying were staying, several people who interviewed some of the suspects told the Miami Herald.
“They probably were watching and waiting for the opportunity for them to do it,” said Investigative Judge Clément Noël, who was among the first to question the two Haitian-Americans among the 19 suspects detained so far.
James A. Solages, 35, and Vincent Joseph, 56, both from South Florida, did not tell Noël why they chose the date that they did — July 7 — to launch the armed attack on Moïse’s private residence, but insisted that the plan was not to assassinate him.
Their mission, Noël and another person who debriefed the men said they were told, was to “arrest the president (at his home) and go to the presidential palace with him.”
The two Haitian Americans “said they were there, but they didn’t go to kill the president,” Noël said. “They said they knew what happened, but they didn’t participate in the killing. They were there to translate.”
In Haiti, it is illegal to arrest anyone after 6 p.m. unless it’s in the commission of a crime, something that Noël thinks is a hole in the men’s story. He said Solages and Joseph insisted that they had a copy of an arrest warrant that night. Asked who provided the warrant, the men claimed they did not remember.
The idea, they told another interviewer, was to install someone else as president, a claim Interim Haiti National Police Chief Léon Charles told the Herald on Saturday he doesn’t believe.
“They wanted to kill him,” Charles said about Moïse, who came into office in 2017. “They knew what they were doing.”
Via France 24:
The widow of slain Haitian leader Jovenel Moise, who was critically wounded in the attack that claimed his life, on Saturday issued her first public remarks since the assault, calling on the nation not to “lose its way.”
“I am alive, thanks to God,” Martine Moise said in an audio message posted on her official Twitter account three days after her husband was shot dead in their home.
“I am alive but I have lost my husband Jovenel,” she added.
The authenticity of the remarks, made in Creole, was confirmed to AFP by Haiti’s minister of culture and communications, Pradel Henriquez.
Martine Moise was rushed to a Haitian hospital after the attack in the early hours of Wednesday, before being evacuated to Miami for treatment.
According to Haitian authorities, an armed commando of 28 men — 26 Colombians and two Haitian-Americans — burst in and opened fire on the couple in their home.
So far, 17 have been arrested, and at least three were killed. A handful remain at large, police say. No motive has been made public.
“In the blink of an eye, the mercenaries entered my home and riddled my husband with bullets … without even giving him a chance to say a word,” Martine Moise said in her audio message.
“I am crying, it is true, but we cannot let the country lose its way,” she said. “We cannot let his blood… have been spilled in vain.”
Her husband’s killing has plunged already troubled Haiti — the poorest country in the Americas — into chaos.
Amid deep uncertainty over its political future, the international community has called on the impoverished Caribbean country to go ahead with the presidential and legislative elections slated for later this year.
“I will not abandon you,” Martine Moise said.
She promised to engage in a direct exchange with Haitians on Facebook “in the near future.”
